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The current social context for adolescence in American culture begs for new ideas and arrangements. Schools are increasingly narrow, sterile, and, for some adolescents, unpleasant and alienating developmental settings. Unconnected to the larger world and sometimes to their own students, schools seem bled of whatever meaning they once had in adolescents’ lives. Children who begin their school careers feeling good about themselves as learners become steadily more self-doubtful (Entwistle and Alexander 1998). This contributes to a loss of motivation to do well, a decline in effort, and a weakening commitment to school as an institution. Urban youth who lose their way in middle school attribute it in part to the impersonal quality of their schools; no one seems to care if they are there or not, doing well or not (Gregory 1995). The lack of

This essay reviews two documents—a book and a newspaper series—that discuss inner-city children's growing exposure to and involvement with violence. The essay focuses particularly on inner-city youths' struggle to find a workable way of coping with the stresses and assaults (both physical and psychological) they experience and on the effects on identity development.

In this article I examine constraints to the provision of responsive and coherent services to poor families. These constraints include Americans' ambivalence about how to interpret and respond to family poverty and an inappropriate reliance on services to address deeply rooted societal problems.

This essay examines the premises and arguments of Lisbeth Schorr's Within Our Reach, in particular Schorr's thesis that the knowledge and means now exist, in the form of a set of proven social intervention strategies, to improve outcomes for our highest-risk children. The author argues that good quality services do have a role to play in ameliorating the effects of poverty but that there are dangers to overpromising what services can accomplish, especially in the absence of other supports for children and families.

Children's out-of-school time, long a low-level source of public concern, has recently emerged as a major social issue. This, in turn, has heightened interest in the heterogeneous field of after-school programs. This article provides a profile of after-school programs for low-income children, focusing on supply and demand, program emphases, and program sponsors and support organizations. It also discusses the major challenges facing the field in the areas of facilities, staffing, and financing. Details and examples are drawn from the ongoing evaluation of a specific after-school program initiative called MOST (Making the Most of Out-of-School Time), which seeks to strengthen after-school programs in Boston, Chicago, and Seattle. Looking ahead, the article highlights the pros and cons of options for increasing coverage to reach more low-income children, strengthening programs, expanding funding, and articulating an appropriate role for after-school programs to fill in the lives of low-income children.

Introduction l The Fair Start Story--An Overview The Programms 2. Appalachian Communities Help Their Own: the Maternal infant Health Outreach Worker Project 3. Outreach to Migrant Farmworker Families: The Fair Start Project 4. Giving the Children of Austin, Texas a Fair Start: The Parent Support Programme 5. A Rural Clinic Reaches Out: The Rural Alabwna Pregnancy and Infant Health Project 6. A Bridge to the New World: The Haitian Perinatal Intervention Project 7. Sharing the Transition: The Adolescent Parents Project 8. A Medical Center Serves Its Neighbourhood: The Child Survival Programme 9. Issues of Program Design and Irnplementation IO.Program Operations: Time Allocation and Cost Analysis II.Realistic Expectations: Review of Evaluation Findings The Child Survival/ Fair Start initiative in Context References Index.

This article examines the challenges of providing home visiting and related supportive services within the framework created by American interpretations of and responses to poverty. In the first half of the article, the author argues that home visiting and related services have been shaped and constrained by the tendency to use services as a substitute for adequate income and economic opportunity, by ambivalent attitudes toward poor people, and by a preoccupation with the effects of poverty on child rearing, among other factors. In the second half of the article, the author discusses some principles of practice that might help support good services under the difficult conditions in which most early childhood programs for poor families must work. He argues that infant mental health theory and practice hold particular promise as a basic organizing structure for these services.

qualities of objects.4 Available evidence suggests that explicit literacynurturing activities are not a part of most poor children's early childhood experience in Latin America.5 To the extent that this is true, the transition to the abstract and disembedded learning that is typical of schooling will be a traumatic one for these children. A team of researchers in rural Guatemala has examined the interaction of child and parent characteristics as these affect adjustment to formal schooling.6 This basic research was part of the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP) longitudinal study, an examination of the effects of nutritional supplementation in four rural villages (to be described below). The researchers in this study found that parents' perceptions of early intellectual ability in their children-which generally seemed to be accurate-led to earlier enrollment (for girls and boys) and greater likelihood of enrollment at all (for girls). It was found that parental education levels and mothers' "modernity" were associated with parents' schooling decisions for their children. In a more dynamic vein, the quality of children's home stimulation during the early years was strongly associated with primary school performance, especially for boys. (Because a more select group of girls attended school, "2James Grant, The State of the World's Children (New York: UNICEF, 1985). s Ernesto Pollitt, Child Development Reference Document: (I) Risk Factors in the Mental Development of Young Children in the Developing Countries (New York: UNICEF, 1984). 4 Elaine Haglund, "The Problem of the Match-Cognitive Transition between Early Childhood and Primary School: Nigeria," Journal of Developing Areas 17 (1982): 77-92. 5 Pollitt. 6 M. Irwin, P. Engle, C. Yarbrough, R. Klein, and J. Townsend, "The Relationship of Prior Ability and Family Characteristics to School Attendance and School Achievement in Rural Guatemala," Child Development 49 (1978): 415-27. Comparative Education Review 195 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.100 on Thu, 25 Aug 2016 05:18:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms